Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/232

226 caught in suspension, to this earth's gravitation, and surface-materials falling from that part Explain or express or accept, and what does it matter? Our attitude is:

Here are the data.

See for yourself.

What does it matter what my notions may be?

Here are the data.

But think for yourself, or think for myself, all mixed up we must be. A long time must go by before we can know Florida from Long Island. So we've had data of fishes that have fallen from our now established and respectabilized Super-Sargasso Sea—which we've almost forgotten, it's now so respectable—but we shall have data of fishes that have fallen during earthquakes. These we accept were dragged down from ponds or other worlds that have been quaked, when only a few miles away, by this earth, some other world also quaking this earth.

In a way, or in its principle, our subject is orthodox enough. Only grant proximity of other worlds—which, however, will not be a matter of granting, but will be a matter of data—and one conventionally conceives of their surfaces quaked—even of a whole lake full of fishes being quaked and dragged down from one of them. The lake full of fishes may cause a little pain to some minds, but the fall of sand and stones is pleasantly enough thought of. More scientific persons, or more faithful hypnotics than we, have taken up this subject, unpainfully, relatively to the moon. For instance, Perrey has gone over 15,000 records of earthquakes, and he has correlated many with proximities of the moon, or has attributed many to the pull of the moon when nearest this earth. Also there is a paper upon this subject in the ''Proc. Roy. Soc. of Cornwall'', 1845. Or, theoretically, when at its closest to this earth, the moon quakes the face of this earth, and is itself quaked—but does not itself fall to this earth. As to showers of matter that may have come from the moon at such times—one can go over old records and find what one pleases.

That is what we now shall do.

Our expressions are for acceptance only.

Our data:

We take them from four classes of phenomena that have preceded or accompanied earthquakes:

Unusual clouds, darkness profound, luminous appearances in the